Keep our news free from ads and paywalls by making a donation to support our work!
Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Poland has recorded the joint-largest decline in road deaths among European Union countries over the last five years. During that time, it has also fallen from having the third-highest fatality rate in the bloc to the joint-seventh highest.
Last year, Poland recorded 52 road deaths per million inhabitants, according to new figures from Eurostat, an EU agency. That number was 35% lower than in 2019, with only Lithuania recording an equally large decline.
The next biggest falls were recorded in Slovenia (-33%) Belgium (-32%) and Denmark (-27%). At the other end of the scale, two countries saw an increase in road death rates: Estonia (which was up by 33% since 2019) and Ireland (23%).
In absolute terms, Poland’s figure of 52 road deaths per million inhabitants was the seventh highest in the bloc, equal with Hungary and below Romania (77), Bulgaria (74), Greece (64), Croatia (62), Latvia (59) and Portugal (56).
The safest roads are in Sweden (20), Malta (21), Denmark (24) and Luxembourg (27), while the figure across the EU as a whole was 44 road deaths per million inhabitants.
Poland’s position in the ranking has improved since 2019, when it had the EU’s third-most-deadly roads, behind only Romania and Bulgaria.
Poland has introduced a number of measures in recent years to improve road safety as part of a national programme for the period 2021-2030 that aims to reduce traffic-related deaths and serious injuries by 50%.
In 2021, the country changed the law to give pedestrians priority at road crossings. Previously, unlike in most European countries, drivers were not required to give way to pedestrians waiting at crossings, only to those who had already stepped onto the stripes.
The following year, new rules were introduced allowing the authorities to confiscate cars from drink drivers. The government also moved to regulate the use of electric scooters following a spate of accidents.
As a result of those efforts, in 2023 Poland won the European Transport Safety Council’s (ETSC) annual award for road safety. The council noted that road deaths in Poland fell by 47% between 2012 and 2022, compared to the EU average of 22%. Only Lithuania (60%) recorded a larger drop over that period.
Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Main image credit: Adrian Grycuk/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 3.0 PL)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
